Palestine – Mubarak Awad: nonviolent resistance was, from the outset, the most common feature of the struggle

Among those involved in the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement, many are pleased with the outcome of the Fateh Sixth Conference held in Bethlehem earlier this month.

Mubarak Awad, Director of the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, is one of them.

Awad told PNN yesterday that he was “very happy” with the outcome of the elections at the Fateh Sixth Conference, particularly with that of the Revolutionary Council whose results were finally announced Sunday.

He described some of the winners as “dear friends who fought with us in the first Intifada”, and who “spoke and exercised nonviolent methods” of struggle and resistance.

Co-founding the Center for the Study of Nonviolence in Jerusalem in 1984, Awad is not new to the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement. He talked this week about some of the new members of the Revolutionary Council as fighters who during the first Intifada “did not rely on weapons and bombing, but on steadfastness, fortitude and sacrifice, hard work day and night to resist the Israeli occupation.”

Like others in the Palestinian nonviolence movement, Awad expressed hope that the outcome of the Fateh election will open a new page to the nonviolent struggle and its methods as an “effective path to liberation and an end to occupation.”

Asked about the reality of the popular resistance, Awad told PNN, “The reality is that nonviolent struggle from the outset is the most common feature of the struggle, despite the fact that armed struggle receives more attention.

“It is violence that attracts the attention of the media and the people in the moment that one hears the sound of the blast and sees a landscape of blood,” Awad said, “while the nonviolent act is based on the depth of a long-term strategy.”